Prince Osuagwu
8 October 2008
For Meganet Nigeria Limited, a Nigerian valued added services provision company, time or distance should not be a barrier to buying airtime and making important calls.
Yet in Nigeria, one can miss important business negotiation or fail to deliver life saving messages because recharge card vendors are not close by.
Harping on the dynamism of new media, the company last week unveiled a scalable platform for recharging phones without such barriers like time, distance and cash. The platform it calls mobile recharge is to enable recharge at the comfort of one's home, office or wherever, provided the person has access to the internet.
Although targeted at top executives and business men whose busy schedules may not allow to move about and buy recharge, mobile recharge is also convenient for students whose campuses are far from where they can buy recharge cards to send important messages to their parents, provided there is a campus cybercafe around.
Unveiling the platform, last week, in his Victoria Island Lagos office, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Meganet, Mr Oso Abiodun explained that the platform rides on the Interswitch payment platform for maximum security and trust, adding that with the combination of security arrangements put in place by his company and that of interswitch, fraudsters and hackers are kept at bay.
According to Abiodun, " we are an information, communication and technology company with core interest in web development, sofware solution development wireless and enterprise solutions.
Since our mission is to develop products and resources that will offer convenience to people in the technology driven economy, we felt that the problem of getting phones recharged at midnight or in a distance far from the recharge card vendor, should not pose a barrier to Nigerian subscribers at this age of digital advancements, particularly when companies like ours are still in business.
"So, we developed a platform, www.mobilerechargeng.com . This platform is developed so as to offer phone subscribers the opportunity to buy airtime from the comfort of their homes and offices with their interswitch ATM debit cards"
Abiodun said that all it takes a subscriber to get on board mobile recharge platform was to log on the website, register free of charge, as a member, pick from the listed vendors including almost all the mobile operators in the country and click the buy button where details of the buyer's card would be required for verification by interswitch.
"Its very easy, once you are registered and you have selected the network you want to buy their recharge, you click the buy button and the site automatically redirects you to a secure interswitch platform where verification would be made on the details of your card, once this is completed, the PIN of the recharge card requested is displayed and a copy sent on your email address" Abiodun added.
He said that plans were underway to develop a platform which would also accommodate the interests of the common masses in buying virtual recharge cards at convenience.
Speaking on the palpable fear in the country over the activities of hackers, Abiodun said that the best form of keeping fraudsters away, was by safeguarding one's secret details like, PIN numbers, passwords among other important information that are not supposed to be shared.
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